News

Today we have launched our new Video Share functionality across the Nexus sites. The concept of the Video Share section is much like the Image Share section; it's an area where you can showcase the videos that you have made that relate to the games we support in some way. Interviews with modders, reviews of mods you like, story-driven machinima and so on and so forth. It's something we've had on our to-do list for two and a half years now so I'm pleased to finally get this out the door.

First and perhaps most importantly, the Video Share section will only work with YouTube videos. We made a conscious decision to forego hosting videos ourselves for a variety of reasons:

Most prolific video creators are already using YouTube and a lot are entwined with their commission scheme so it seemed pointless to force them to upload their videos again, here, when a ready made and proven service is already available.

YouTube have a great and powerful API we can easily hook in to.

It's unlikely a lot of people already using YouTube would want to upload their videos here anyway as it may result in a loss of subscribers. By linking in with YouTube's API our relationship with YouTube is symbiotic, advantageous to YouTuber's and non-detrimental to prolific YouTuber's.

Hosting videos, that are often large files that require resource intensive encoding, is a costly investment (it can easily run in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars). It seemed more prudent to continue to direct funds towards the ongoing stability of these sites rather than on a new feature.

Coding a video player seemed pointless, and a waste of what would likely have been months of programmer time, when YouTube works fine.

More liability falls on YouTube than us if someone uploads something they shouldn't.

While I understand some of you will not be fans of YouTube it is the most convenient service for us to hook in to. We do not have any plans to support other video services at this time.

As a result the Video Share system becomes an indexing service for videos users upload to YouTube. You might ask, "What's the point, I might as well just go to YouTube". Well, not really. If you go to YouTube and type in "Skyrim mods" you'll get a crap-ton of results with very little filtering options past that. The idea of the Nexus Video Share is to provide a better indexing service than what YouTube can offer, specialised to what users of this site are going to be more interested in and allows authors to showcase their videos, and especially the mods showcased within those videos, more easily to users who are interested in such content.

We've added a new feature to our video share system that I'd like to have implemented into the Image Share section at some point soon. When adding videos to our database you can specify which Nexus mods are being showcased in the video. Something I see time and time again in YouTube comments are users asking the video author what mods they're using. The idea of this system is to allow authors to quickly and easily add these mods to their video pages, providing exposure for those mods while similarly relieving the burden of continually answering the same questions for the author.

If you're looking to add your videos to our Video Share database then we've made it easy for you. We've plugged an importer in to YouTube's API that will connect to your account (via YouTube's API servers, and not ours, for obvious security reasons!), find all your videos and provide you with an easy to use interface to choose the videos you'd like to add to our Video Share. If you're a weekly mod reviewer and you've been releasing a video every week for the past 3 years then you'll probably find it a lot quicker to use our importer than you would manually adding each new video in to our database. Alternatively you can easily add your videos to our database manually using our video adding wizard.

The Video Share guidelines will follow the same rules as the Image Share guidelines which most importantly includes a no nudity/sex rule. I don't currently have any plans to offer a Supporter Video Share that has more liberal rules. We'll just see how it goes.

A Video Share section has always seemed like a logical extension of our Image Share section. I've no idea how much it will be used but considering the two and a half year wait to get around to doing this work I'm just pleased we could finally release it.